Several measures were taken to have R80 more stable than any major version that we've had before:

Prior to GA we accompanied over 150 customers with their transition to R80, and incorporated all of their feedback.

We changed the way we verify the quality of our daily builds. Automatic processes have been running after every feature change to R80 to check whether operations do not get affected, including: upgrades from R7x, install policy, multi-admins work, logs-to-policy-management integration, multi domain operations, HA synchronizations, objects creation and more.

We hope that the Upgrade Verification Service can assure your confidence in R80 over your environments.

Another thing worth noting is that R80 is a Management-only release, therefore Gateway operations do not get affected by this upgrade.

Hi Derek, I've upgraded my production management as a part of the EA program and I've working with 3 pre-R80 gateways (2 R77.30 and1 R77.20) for almost two months.

As far for now I don't have any issues in the daily work basis. In fact I found some improvements for one gateway behind a slow MPLS link, when I've try to install policies with the R77.30 management sometimes the installation failed because of timeout issues. Nowadays I can assure that the installation times have improved and it didn't fails at all.

On the other hand we found some issues with the QoS blade, and the policy management for Mobile Access is quite awkward (it still uses the R77 dashboard).

TL;DR: I have R80 EA in production environment running for two months and in the overall I found more pros than cons.

Great information. I was curious if the delta like changes of R80 management was going to work with down level gateways. Sounds like that is true. That is almost worth upgrading right there! Waiting 1-3 minutes for every policy push has been the bane of my existence for years!

Derek, beware: as far that the EA engineer that helped me with the upgrade told me the delta changes does not apply to Pre-R80 gateways. But we take the installation times with R77.30 and then we compare with R80 and we came down for like almost 1 minute faster with R80.

But keep in mind with R77.30 management the policy installation took more than 5 minutes to install. Yes, that crappy MPLS link also has been too the bane of my existence.

Your policy installation times for older R77.XX gateways almost certainly improved due to the fact that policy operations are now fully multithreaded on an R80 SMS as opposed to an R77 SMS, where all policy operations were single-threaded via the fwm process. The number of cores on your SMS will dictate how much of a performance gain is achieved; I have personally seen a policy verify/compilation consume 400% of CPU (4 cores) on an R80 SMS while running top. A very welcome improvement to be sure; policy deltas for R80.10 gateways should improve performance even more.

Several measures were taken to have R80 more stable than any major version that we've had before:

Prior to GA we accompanied over 150 customers with their transition to R80, and incorporated all of their feedback.

We changed the way we verify the quality of our daily builds. Automatic processes have been running after every feature change to R80 to check whether operations do not get affected, including: upgrades from R7x, install policy, multi-admins work, logs-to-policy-management integration, multi domain operations, HA synchronizations, objects creation and more.

We hope that the Upgrade Verification Service can assure your confidence in R80 over your environments.

Another thing worth noting is that R80 is a Management-only release, therefore Gateway operations do not get affected by this upgrade.